In fact, the survey claims, British businesses may be wasting as much as 3.5 billion pounds per year by failing to maximise the value of their IT.

So how can you make sure that you are getting the most out of your systems? First of all, when considering any future investment, make sure that your plans are clearly aligned with your business goals. In other words, make the business case for the investment clearly in terms of how the technology will aid the company, rather than simply investing for the sake of it.

Consolidating systems

How do you know, though, if your existing systems are being underused? The first thing to consider is a thorough audit of the systems that are in place and how your employees actually use them. You may wish to use a third-party to conduct this audit and make recommendations on their findings. For example, Advance can provide an infrastructure report which makes recommendations for optimising your systems.

Look for ways to consolidate different systems. For example, if you have traditional phone services, switching to a voice over IP-based system will let you get more out of your data connection, and potentially reduce your call costs

Online services

Once you have done this, you can begin to consider ways in which you can get more from what you already have.

One excellent way of doing this is to look at expanding the role which Internet-based services play in your business ? particularly where these services are either low-cost or free.

Hardware life

One additional way to get more from your existing systems is simply to extend the life of the hardware you already have. While the cost of PCs has come down significantly over the last few years, they remain an expensive part of your infrastructure, and one which can realistically be used for longer than three years for most business purposes.

If you are going to do this, though, make sure that you have adequate systems in place to support older hardware and software. Consider, for example, services like Network Guardian which can monitor the health of a server remotely to spot problems early, and repair or replace faulty hardware if required.